“Mario Cuomo Here”

The right-wing talk-radio host Bob Grant used to call Governor Mario Cuomo “the sfaccimm”—an Italian epithet that Grant (whose given name was Robert Ciro Gigante) told me could be translated into something like “low-life,” “heel,” or “low-born.” “It’s not a dirty word,” Grant said, as if that somehow made his business—the wholesale degradation of public discourse—less odious. (Grant called Mayor David Dinkins “the men’s room attendant,” and assured me that there was nothing racial or ethnic in his choice of slur for either man.) This was in the spring of 1994, Cuomo’s final year as an elected official, and “The Bob Grant Show” on WABC was the no. 1 afternoon-drive-time show in New York City. I was a rookie freelance magazine writer working on a profile of the radio loudmouth, so I put in the requisite call to the Governor’s press office, in Albany, soliciting an interview, and got the requisite brush-off. And then, that evening, my phone rang, and the guy on the other end said, “Mario Cuomo here. Is this a good time?”

I knew his voice. He’d been my governor for a dozen years and had seemed, for a time, bound to become my President, or else, then, a Supreme Court Justice—and we were all then still adjusting to the fact that Cuomo would prefer not to. He was the Bartleby of American politics. He wasn’t a great governor. But he was a great speaker, and his voice stood for exactly the opposite of what Bob Grant’s stood for: raising the quality of public discourse, in substance, of course, and also in tone. It quickly became clear, that was why he had called back.

“I don’t ever recall having a political argument with Bob Grant,” he began. “I’ve known him a long time. I’ve always liked him. I’ve helped him, which he’s aware of but never mentions.” Cuomo let that hang there, unexplained, then got to the point: “I never listen to him.”

“He calls you sfaccimm,” I said.

“I don’t know why,” the Governor said. “I assume it makes money for him.” But that didn’t satisfy him. The profit motive might explain Grant’s ugliness, but it left another question unanswered: Why was that particular form of ugliness—Cuomo summed it up as “divisiveness, scapegoating, name-calling, shouting, callousness, lack of civility”—profitable?

“It’s very interesting,” Cuomo said. “Hate sells.” He took it as a “measure of the times,” and, yet, he said, “I’m not sure that it’s different than it’s ever been.” He added that it brought to mind “the old Southern politician’s line—that any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good man or woman to build one.”

Cuomo had been a radio host himself, long ago. “I loved it. I just sat down, the light would go on, I'd start talking,” he said, which was a pretty good description of what he was doing on the phone with me. There was already murmuring that he would return to the air when he left office, which he did for a time. Still, he said, “I’ve had enough experience with it to suspect, and I’m just inches away from believing, that the audience is skewed; that there’s something about the format that encourages the most negative, the most angry people; that it’s used as a kind of catharsis. It’s not really an attempt at dialogue, it’s a catharsis: I’m angry and I’m going to get this off the chest, and I’m going to say it and say it to a larger community, I don’t want to discuss it, I’m already convinced—I think this guy’s a dope! That’s catharsis. That’s different from a poll, different from a dialogue. It indicates an unhappiness, but that’s an unhappiness that’s been around for a long time. Especially if you’re hard-working middle class from my old neighborhood. You look around at people that are poorer and not working and getting supported, and I’m knocking myself out, I've got nothing, and this guy’s poorer than me, but he’s being fed. I think the catharsis is not all good, because it does encourage, and it does get cyclical and retaliatory. I guess a psychiatrist would say there’s some good to the venting process, but it does also promote an attitude of saying, ‘Hey there’s nothing wrong with being filled with hate, there’s so much of it around.’ I don’t like that. There’s something about rhetorical violence that is ugly and worrying.”

Twenty years later, we may be tempted to see that as a more innocent era—back before Fox News, back before the Internet, back when a governor might call a cub reporter he’d never met just to muse a little at the end of a day about the condition of our civilization. Yet, against the tide of bile that forever threatens to swamp us, Cuomo’s voice was as striking then as it sounds to us now. May he rest in peace.

Philip Gourevitch has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1995 and a staff writer since 1997.